Tag : Walking(17)

Everyone knows walking is good for you. It’s plain common sense, backed by a wealth of recent medical research. In fact, a major new study found that lack of physical activity is twice as deadly for us as obesity.

Health data shows that as little as 30 minutes of walking a day cuts the incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in half, lowers the likelihood of diabetes by 60 percent, limits colon cancer by 31 percent for women and reduces risk of dementia, heart disease, depression, osteoporosis, glaucoma and catching a cold.

This kind of evidence prompted U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue a call for Americans to walk more. “Physical activity – such as brisk walking – can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes,” Murthy explains. “Even a small first effort can make a big difference in improving the personal health of an individual and the public health of the nation.”

People are more likely to have a lower weight if they regularly engage in high impact walking compared to doing another vigorous activity like going to the gym, according to new LSE research. The results are particularly pronounced in women, people over 50, and those on low incomes.

Dr Grace Lordan, a specialist in health economics who led the research, examined reported physical activity levels from the annual Health Survey for England (HSE) from 1999 to 2012. In particular, she focused on activities which increased heart rate and caused perspiring. Individuals reported on the number of periods they engaged in 30 minutes or more of:

Walking at a fast or brisk pace.

Moderate-intensity sports or exercise, such as swimming, cycling, working out at the gym, dancing, running, football/rugby, badminton/tennis, squash, and exercises including press-ups and sit-ups.

After 75 years of planning that produces a sedentary lifestyle, a radical redesign of our cities and open space has begun. Parks and paths are making a comeback to create truly walkable communities through partnerships between local residents, businesses, developers, municipalities, urban planners and health care providers.

The health benefits of walking are numerous. A regular walking routine of 30-minutes a day, five days a week can help prevent heart disease, diabetes, depression and some cancers. Take 30 minutes to watch the film then, take a 30 minute walk. It will be the best hour of the day.

Back to school doesn’t have to mean back to car rides. Start your day with a fun active commute to school. Does your child like to walk, bike, scooter? The natural choice for kids is to pick an active mode of transportation over yet another car ride. You will love it too after experiencing the fun an active commute brings to your morning and afternoon. Here are five ideas to make active transportation a part of your every day.

A new study shows that people who live in neighbourhoods where they can walk to grocery stores, schools and shops are less likely to be overweight or obese than those who live in places where the car is king.

Researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) found that people who lived in Ontario’s most walkable neighbourhoods weighed seven pounds less, on average, than people who lived in places where they depended on cars for almost all of their errands.

Those in the most car-dependent neighbourhoods were 70 per cent more likely to be obese than people living in what researchers classified as a “walker’s paradise.”

A neighbourhood’s walkability had a direct relationship with body mass index: the more walkable the neighbourhood, the better the weight status of the people who lived there, the study said.

It’s mistakenly assumed that no one in smaller communities walks, except between their pick-up truck and the Walmart entrance. Actually, walking is far more common in smaller communities across the country than people think. In towns of 10,000-50,000, 8.5 percent of all trips are made on foot, second only to “urban core” communities, according to the US Department of Transportation’s National Household Travel Survey. In smaller towns 2500 to 10,000, walking accounts for 7.2 percent of trips–higher than in most suburban communities.

Albert Lea in many ways resembles Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. It’s a place “where the women are strong…and all the children are above average.” That fits with goals local citizens embraced in 2009 when they adopted a community-wide approach to wellness laid out in Blues Zones, a best-selling book by National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner, which examines places around the world where people live longest and healthiest.

What they’ve accomplished over the past five years offers both lessons and inspiration for smaller towns and cities across the US. “The idea is to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” says Buettner, whose new book The Blue Zones Solution chronicles the progress in Albert Lea together with other community success stories around the world.

Resilience is the ability of a system or community to withstand impacts from outside. An indicator is a good way of measuring that. Conventionally, the principal way of measuring a reducing carbon footprint is CO2 emissions. However, we firmly believe that cutting carbon while failing to build resilience is an insufficient response when you’re trying to address multiple shocks such as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis together.

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger…. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now….